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Offense <-> Defense feeding specializations are boring.
spinnytop
Posts: 16,450 Arc User
The Best Defense, Aggressive Stance. Great for buffing up your defense and offense, but also terribly boring. Part of what makes them so boring is how good they are - they drastically overshadow other specs, which leads to a "why would you pick something else?" sort of situation (unless you're a healer, and maybe even then). So sure, we all have an easy no-brainer source of high offense and defense, but the spec system was supposed to give us interesting new choices to mechanically differentiate our characters.
So, here's some ideas on replacements:
Original: Warden, The Best Defense
Replacement: Hard Style
- You gain 20% of your Defense damage resistance bonus as undiminishable defense penetration on melee attacks.
Original: Guardian, The Best Defense
Replacement: Shielded Aim
- You gain 20% of your Defense damage resistance bonus as charge time reduction to all your single target ranged attacks.
Original: Aggressive Stance
Replacement: Every time you get a critical hit you get 35% of your offense damage bonus as dodge chance - stacks up to 5 times, stacks fall off individually.
This keeps the original spirit of "offense improving defense" and "defense improving offense", while removing the blatantly-better-than-everything-else aspect (you know, the reason people would complain about these kinds of changes ~.^), and making the specs more interesting at the same time.
So, here's some ideas on replacements:
Original: Warden, The Best Defense
Replacement: Hard Style
- You gain 20% of your Defense damage resistance bonus as undiminishable defense penetration on melee attacks.
Original: Guardian, The Best Defense
Replacement: Shielded Aim
- You gain 20% of your Defense damage resistance bonus as charge time reduction to all your single target ranged attacks.
Original: Aggressive Stance
Replacement: Every time you get a critical hit you get 35% of your offense damage bonus as dodge chance - stacks up to 5 times, stacks fall off individually.
This keeps the original spirit of "offense improving defense" and "defense improving offense", while removing the blatantly-better-than-everything-else aspect (you know, the reason people would complain about these kinds of changes ~.^), and making the specs more interesting at the same time.
Post edited by spinnytop on
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When I have a toon focused on offense or defense, these specs are an absolute must.
Instead of changing choices, making some of the other choices a bit better, such as higher percents or more triggering conditions, would be my preference.
I'd particularly like the specs that improve a hero's Energy Builder to be a bit better.
Whoever you are, be that person one hundred percent. Don't compromise on your identity.
/no thanks to the removal of options.
Bad choice is no choice. Every game with issues like these supports that, and we've known this for over two decades now.
Interestingly enough, you listed off one role that has no purpose in the game because people are too strong offensively and defensively, and another role that is relegated to being extremely niche for the same reason.
You have 52 cups. Two of the cups have more water in them than the rest.
You can either fill 50 cups with more water, or you can pour out a little from the 2 cups.
This might surprise some people, but if they removed The Best Defense and Aggressive Stance entirely from the game, you would still be able to win.
I welcome your suggestions for more interesting spec choices.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Having one spec that just does it's thing, without you having to worry about it while you're playing the game, is not any more interesting than an other spec that works like that.
The only point where that makes a difference is while you are making your build, and that will just stay being like "test test test, oh this is the optimal choice, I'll go with that". The specs that are actually interesting while playing the game, work in a way that requires you to do one thing, to get better results for another thing you can do.
That being said, I don't think defense-offense feedback loop is the biggest problem in CO.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
If cryptic wants to make content that is challenging for 90% of the players/builds, they'll need to make sure there are not such huge differences in build performance. So depending on their intentions, nerfs are just needed. And there haven't been that many nerfs to players lately, only vehicles have been getting any attention.
About the "nerfs or buffs", nerfing a few overperforming options is a much more effective way to start. If you have 10% of the powers performing to low, 80% of the powers perform more or less like intended, and 10% of the powers overperforming (and in practice 80% of the freeform people will use those 10% overperforming options).
Buffing to weakest 10% to the "intended" level, will not change that much, nerfing the 10% overperforming will make 90% of all powers competitive.
I welcome your suggestions for more interesting specs.
Everyone thinks something different is the biggest problem in CO. Such being the case, when making suggestions in the suggestion forum, it is best to completely ignore the concept of "biggest problem in CO", otherwise nobody would ever post any suggestions.
It's not an either/or situation. There are multiple people on the dev team.
Also, this thread isn't about nerfs, so please don't bring that up.
I agree. Specs were meant to create diversity - they ended up motivating people into doing the same thing over and over instead, with that thing being incredibly plain.. it's a mechanic that can be summed up as "makes numbers bigger all the time".
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I am not going to spend time to make up some examples.
I already gave you a description what kind of specs are actually less boring. Having a general direction for making less boring specs is far more usefull than one or two examples we can use to argue over implementation specifics.
If you want an examples look at Setup, or Preemptive Strike, or the Presence Mastery. I am not conviced specs actually need to be less boring, but if that is your intention do try to actually make them less boring.
The builds that are affected most by the offense<>defense loop are builds with the highest defense to begin with.
And that is by a pretty big margin builds that focus on the Juggernaut spec.
So that leads to the question, why is Juggernaut so much better than other specs.
In my opinion that can be explained by STR being intended as a melee stat.
Melee builds have it quite a bit harder in CO, so they'll need some advantages, and specs are a good place to add those.
All in all that is not a huge problem in my opinion.
It gets odd when these things are doing so well that even for ranged builds it is one of the best option.
So there are three options to change that (at the top of my hat).
Nerf juggernaut, and/or nerf offense<>defense loop.
Buff all other specs.
Tie STR more tightly to melee attacks.
The first two options will shift power balance even more to ranged than it already is, so not good options in my opinion.
So I'd prefer just leave these things alone for melee builds for now, and tie STR specs more strongly to melee powers.
Like I suggested in the "Nerf Juggernaut" thread, making the STR severity (Brutality) specs only apply to melee attacks would be enough for that.
Then if they'd remove CON scaling from Nimble Mind (stopping stacking CON from being the end all be all option, which is needed anyway), I'd be ok with the offense<>defense loop.
All this stuff is exactly why it is important to decide where to start making changes.
Start at the wrong point, and you'll end up with broken and unintended stuff.
Thanks for stopping by
The rest of your post appears to be you talking about why you think issue A isn't as important as issue B. Like I stated, I'm ignoring all those kinds of things and just posting suggestions as I think of them. This thread is about making certain specs more interesting. If you don't agree with the overall point of the thread feel free to drop an "/unsigned" and move on. I'm sticking to my guns though
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I agree with the aim here, but disagree with the implementation. While the hard style/shielded aim perks do make sense, they are specialized for rather specific setups. If anything, all of the perks should be tooled to be more flexible (i.e. something like making Relentless Assault refresh whenever landing an attack, instead of only stacking/refreshing on maintain usage).
My concept goes more conservative, being similar to the original perks, but removing the ability to 'feedback loop', which is the main issue here:
The Best Defense
Original: Gain up to 100% of your defense as offense stat.
New: Your defense provides you a passive boost to all damage output (300 defense ~= 10% extra damage).
Aggressive Stance
Original: Gain up to 20% of your offense as defense stat.
New: Your offense stat provides you bonus damage resistance (300 offense ~= 20% extra resistance).
So it's subtly changed - same general effect, but the very specific clause of being tied to the Offense/Defense stat is removed. The effect of a lone perk from one of those trees should be the same (maybe even a little stronger), but the magic combo of Warden/Vindicator or Guardian/Vindicator no longer exists. It'll change stuff around, so that something like Guardian/Avenger is obviously a whole lot more damaging than Guardia/Vind, and the intended use of something like Warden/Protector or Guardian/Sentry becomes more attractive - because the game's no longer about creating one magic feedback loop, it's now about stacking as much defense stat as possible to get a damage boost, which is what Protector/Sentry/Any tank tree does good at.
In fact, all that taken into account, it'd be feasible to just do one of those two, and the feedback issue would be instantly solved.
So true, nerfs are nerfs. And they suck for most people. Which is why I said they need to buff everything first. For if they just nerf things, people are just going to move on to the next min/max optimized build, there will not be more diverse builds due to a few nerfs. But if they buff everything, than you might see some diversification.
And yes, I agree with Gradii about the 90% remark. 90% of the builds out there are not god builds that focus on broken mechanics. So content should not be made for those types of builds, for than you leave behind theme builders and silver players and suddenly you lose people, just to satisfy a minority of players.
You want challenging content? Than stop using god builds. Make your builds suck on purpose. And than you'll have the challenge you are looking for.
The whole offense/defense loop is not all its cracked up to be. Its not so powerful that it breaks the game. It might seem like it, but its actually not. And quite frankly, dps toons need that loop just to have some form of defense.
I wouldn't expect anything else.
And I did more or less make an /unsigned post at first, but then you reacted and asked for stuff.
Nope that is not what I meant. I was talking more from a design point of view.
When designing any fight, there is some target on what's expected from players and builds.
Targeting player skill is tricky and only half of that is in cryptic's hands. Targeting the performance of builds is completely in cryptic's hands, and is much more easy without the balance oddities we have in CO.
Well motivated and timely executed nerfs do not negatively affect my morale. I do get demotivated when seeing long standing balance issues (for either overpowered of underpowered stuff) not getting any attention.
Also, even with such huge balance issues as arbitrary AO X affecting performance ten times more than AO Y, surprisingly the last serious nerf to any PC powers was a long time ago. So when not discussing vehicles, I don't understand where the idea comes from that things are getting nerfed all the time.
I'm a bit against making Brutality melee-only as is- it's nice to still promote range/melee mix synergy, and it helps w/ crit heals for melee survival. Alternative is making Overpower give general crit% and Brutality give melee-only severity, I suppose.
I dun wanna focus too much on nerfing Juggy+Con, though- we've had too many prominent nerfs lately, imo. Would like to highlight more of the weaker stuff they could buff.. not just for balance, but also to show some more good will to players that aren't as privy to balance issues.
Like, if they buffed Enforcer to match Administer for Ranged, and allowed Arbiter Mastery to proc Honor, that'd be a first step. Rend and Impact's debuffs could also be buffed a bit. Would also like to see the diminishing debuff timer removed from Trapped and Concussion- it just makes building around the debuffs too restrictive on bosses. Arbiter and Overseer Auras also could be buffed or made to be true base dmg% modifiers.
Would also be nice if Commander had some pet->player feedback instead of just boosting pets or pet-crit derived from the player. Then, even builds w/ just 1-2 pet powers could still spec into Commander and not lose too much personal performance (to make room, def consolidate the three SS scaling options on T2 to two- merging Relief and Durable makes the most sense). Well Trained is also a bit problematic, as activating a pet's cd abilities more often could lead them to lose even more single-target dps- perhaps instead make Well Trained give the pet and owner a sizable dmg&heal buff when a pet's cd ability is used (and maybe for the temp pets, a trigger when they are killed or expire).
For Sentry, I would buff Sentry Aura to (probably) double its current values, double the duration on Reinforce, and re-design Fortify- since imo Fortify's benefit is too similar to Reinforce's. I would prob make it something like "Whenever you heal 2% or more of your or an ally's health, you gain X% crit (generalized) and Z% bonus heal% for Y seconds", to help w/ its own synergy (Reinforce) and make it more compet dps w/ other 2ndary options for support or tanks.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
But all the other stats already have either neutral or ranged specific specs.
The STR stat is clearly a melee stat, so when you're wanting a hybrid ranged/melee build, it is quite reasonable STR is not the best primary stat to use? STR specs can be used as a way to give builds focussing on melee attacks some much needed advantages.
Having knock resistance easily worked into a build is one of the perks of making a melee build. If you want that with ranged powers just be prepared to make some concessions, like getting CON primary, or getting an otherwise useless stat just for knock resistance.... or just do whatever and get AoPM...
The damage bonus auras are quite weak, getting a few points of damage strenght.... yay.. I hardly notice any difference in damage. The biggest problem with those auras (or Circle of Ebon Wrath, or Gravitational Polarity, or etc) is that most builds are already far into the diminishing returns for damage strength, which is mostly caused by forms.
Changing that to base damage could be nice, but the numbers would need to be reduced. 5% base damage bonus for all the team would be a bit to much, 3% is more than enough.
About commander, I've had lots of discussions about that with a friend. I think the best way for that is if it would give a buff depending on how many pets you have. A huge bonus when having only one pet, and getting lower the more pets you have active.
Sentry I actually like quite a bit already, I am using it on my healer and my PA tank. Outside of defense, sentry specs can give 22% resistance which is more than enough to be useful. But I don't think your suggestions would make it overpowered, so I'd be ok with those.
Could you clarify? How is giving my opinion about stuff tied to me (not) talking about something being specifically balanced for my skill or builds?
Then I still don't really understand your earlier reaction.. but lets drop that, I think it's not very productive for this thread.
Back OT.
I said quite a few times (why) I don't care much for changing Juggernaut or the defense<>offense loop.
The only spec change I proposed that is tied (an alternative) to the issue the OP made suggestions for, is changing Brutality to only apply to melee attacks.
My favorite example is non-combo based non-flanking melee dps. Spec that and you pretty much have like 2 options. That's an issue.
RIP Caine
Exactly why I said buff everything else first before nerfing anything.
This has been proven false repeatedly. I prove it false every day, because my builds are not these fabled "god builds" and I still long for more challenging content.
In fact... the entire notion you're going for here goes against what Gradii said: you're implying that challenge comes from raw number manipulation... which it doesn't.
Yes... and you never provided the stuff I asked for, you just provided more stuff I already said I didn't need
Sounds like a different thread topic. Go ahead and make it and I'll post my thoughts in it
This thread isn't about buffing or nerfing, it's about making things more interesting. Feel free to make a thread where you demand that underperforming powers should be buffed, everyone will agree with you - it's basically a non-issue so it's not even worth bringing up at this point (you keep bringing it up like anyone has disagreed with you xD).
That was actually intentional. I believe that specializations should be specialized. The specialized specializations are, to me at least, the most interesting ones, because they're the only specializations that actually lead to any sort of specialization in specialized builds... which is what makes them special (and interesting). The more broadly applicable a specialization is, the closer you get to "everyone take this".
For example the "increases defense by 30%" specializations that every tank spec group has to me just screams "phoned it in". That would be something that I, if I had designed the system, would have included as a passive bonus that you get for investing 10 points into any of the tanking spec groups, and then replace those 3pt specializations with something more unique and functional.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
As replacements though? No thanks.
Thanks for stopping by
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
I think it'd be okay if Ego and Str gave similar boosts for their more prominent picks (ranged_melee cost discount, defense, either generalized crit or generalized severity), but where Str innately means less knock resist, Ego PSS means both ur crit% or severity are generalized.
Another option is swapping Exploit Opening to T1 so it has another dps (vs. defense or cost reduct) option over STR PSS, though that'd mean Dex PSS needs even more help by comparison.
Yeah, players favoring Overseer or Arbiter for their ally/aura benefits sounds good to me- make the choice between self-benefit (Ward/Gaurdicator) vs. group benefit less clear-cut than it is now.
That'd work out too. I just want the pet owner to see more benefits from the tree than current. Commander can be a decent boost to pets (much of it QoL-related when ya have a legion of pets), it'd just be nice if it came into play for more build types than current.
Yeah Sentry isn't as bad as some of the others, I just want to see it boosted a bit more so players have to make more tough choices than they do now.
Taco: I think the crux of it is that the devs intended players to use the basic combos and blasts more than we do now, where many vet FF builders won't touch most of them (for good reason).
In my mind, having less supporting options for builds excluding these basic powers to accommodate high-tier ones is a fair drawback to being able to bypass using low-teir stuff entirely (the balance by tiers isn't great in this game, but the general trend is still there).
And ofc this is all w/ the caveat that power gaps between the spec trees are still not good. Hell, Warden prob does combos better than Arbiter atm if ya factor in its mastery (they should at least be rel even dps boosts- one for dps/tank, other for dps/support), and the most powerful blasts aren't charged for things like AvM. Guardian Mastery's dodge rating was also not updated w/ the dodge rating changes, a lunge->big hit option isn't viable cause Brawler mastery is bleh, and so on and so forth.
- Be safe and have fun, champs - for science!
True, but easily fixed by making that "severity applies only to melee attacks and selfheals".
Hell, even running one of em. A single player being able to freight-train just about anything it comes across is probably not good. You don't need to manipulate raw damage numbers to stop a player running one of those things. As much as I might hate him, Rakshasa is a good example of a boss mechanic that can shut down some otherwise untouchable builds. His mobs knock, some of them cc, and he threat wipes. You have to pay attention to his adds, and he HAS SOME.
We have to be the only cryptic engine game that only uses adds as a gimmick. It's insane, considering we're the one that can use them the most.
RIP Caine
And Aggressive Stance could do the reverse.
Problem solved.
Now this is what a suggestion for more interesting specs looks like. That 50/100 offense looks high though. 25/50 seems more logical given what other specs give. 30/60/90 defense also seems high, 15/30/45 seems more reasonable.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Stupid people should be punished. Rakshasa punishes the stupid.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Hm...never noticed even when I had aggro.
True enough.
With what? Is that like someone without a mouse? Perhaps that's someone who uses tab(since it does have it's issues) but then...alot of people do use tab so wouldn't that make that option "average"?
Honestly, if Rakshasa is an issue then just do it the easy way:
1. Target Rakshasa.
2. Activate Autofollow(even if you're Ranged).
3. When you lose target if you cannot left click him then zoom in with the camera and left click him since you're on autofollow and his hitbox will be that thing directly in front of you.
And now to go on topic:
I see what you're all saying and I do think the Spec Tree needs some love to actually deliver on the "Larger Diversification" that was the big buzz thing leading up to On Alert(Since we lost 3 gear slots which actually makes it harder to diversify but easier to stat focus).
Honestly, and this is so highly unlikely I hesitate to even mention it really, but I think the problem with the way the Spec System is set up is the way the Spec System is set up. I agree with Foxi that each of the spec branches should be an actual focus into a style/mechanics system(although either with more Melee AND ranged friendly specs or enough options to properly split them if need be) . There should also be a different system than the one we have which allows you to "dip" a little bit into something like Warden and drop 3 points and then dip into Commander for a few more points or, if you are so inclined, just dump all of your points into Warden and get it's nice End Tier Spec. Honestly, I think NW does this task better than CO but the NW system is lacking the ability to have more than 3 trees, which I feel CO would need because of it's freeform. Off the top of my head...let the players still have roughly the same amount of points but be able to pick 1-2 Superstat and between 2-4 spec trees, both depending on how much you focus or thinly spread the points. Then, while we're redoing stuff, cut the redundant stuff out of the system and put in more niche` "specialized" things.
Oh, and on a completely random "it just came to me" thought....chunk in a mentalist tree and put in a spec where your target is less likely to break crowd control from other sources of damage(yours still count) BUT...you take some "feedback damage" as a tradeoff.
I understand that such a radical change is highly unlikely but I was bored and figured, "why not?"
Join Date: Aug 2009 | Title: Devslayer
Not true. No matter what your power setup, so long as you're blasting worms with whatever powers you do have, you're helping to cull their population - they don't take much to kill, the problem only arises when people don't try. Not sure what you mean by targeting setup.. any targeting setup, whether it be auto or tab, can get the worms in their sights.
The problem is when people are too obsessed with retargeting Rakshasa and waste time with that instead of clearing worms.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
For tricky targeting stuff, like healing in F&I, I use:
/bind decimal startchatwith /tell, @MyHandle /bind numpad0 target "$target"
After that target someone, and press your decimal and keys to print a line in the chat window, you can quickly copypaste that to set your numpad 0 key to (re)target someone (change @MyHandle to your own).
Well its a way to get one without needing to type your own "/bind somekey target somename" keybind every time you want to set it to a new target name.
My super cool CC build and how to use it.
Attacking the worms just for killing worms is to inefficient for my tastes.
I don't remember ever seeing any Rak alert fail, or even get close to failing.
This has not been my experience in this encounter.
Actually, the only real time I can think of having any issues targetting mobs is there's a "blind spot" you can sometimes run into when tab targetting which, ironically, seems to be about 1f away from your toon's face. I used to see this quite often in Therakiel's Temple but I believe it can occur almost anywhere.
Aiqa:
Thanks Aiqa but I was more asking what this "non optimized targeting setup" was moreso than asking for any actual help. For stuff like the rampages I get by but wow I would be ever so much happier if the F-Targetting worked properly in these things. :biggrin:
Spinny
Honestly, I think the last time I saw a Rakshasa Alert fail was when he, Mr. Gemini, and Viper X had that "insane-o-summoning overdrive" bug that one time and would summon pets nonstop...and even then I only saw it fail very few times(course, I also saw those alerts actually pop a very few times since alot of players avoided them like the plague until they were fixed).
Join Date: Aug 2009 | Title: Devslayer
Well keep in mind, we're talking about people without any effective aoe... apparently those exist? I'm taking Gradii on his word on that one.
I haven't seen any Rak alerts fail either... but I might not be a good source of information on that since apparently I'm always there during those alerts o3o
My super cool CC build and how to use it.